The Salvador Option

by Jack R. Johnson 04.2025

In Latin America, the term is 'desaparecidos': the secret abduction or imprisonment of a person with the support of a state followed by a refusal to acknowledge the person's fate or whereabouts. The intent of course is to place the victim outside the protection of the law. 

Of late, there have been some quasi ‘desaparecido’ episodes in this country, most famously Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was arrested in March in Maryland. A few days after his arrest, he was mistakenly placed on a flight with other men that the Trump administration alleged were members of the Venezuelan street gang, Tren de Aragua.  They were sent to El Salvador’s infamous Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT prison, a brutal place where reports of torture are not uncommon.  Ironically, a U.S. immigration judge had specific orders shielding Abrego Garcia from deportation to El Salvador because “he was likely to face persecution there by a local gang.” The gang in question was the notorious MS-13 (Mara Salvatrucha) that tried to extort his family and then recruit him into their ranks before he fled the country. In other words, Abrego Garcia migrated to the U.S. to escape MS-13 gang violence in El Salvador, and now he’s mistakenly being sent back to one of the most dangerous MS-13 prisons on Earth.

The U.S. District Court Judge Xinis hearing Abrego Garcia’s case wrote, “[H]is detention appears wholly lawless.” It is “a clear constitutional violation.” And yet administration officials “cling to the stunning proposition that they can forcibly remove any person—migrant and U.S. citizen alike—to prisons outside the United States….”

There’s a weird appropriateness to being disappeared to El Salvador, because the so called ‘Salvador option’ was made famous there, a kind of desaparecidos on a nationwide scale. 

The term ‘desaparecidos’ was coined in Argentina, during its so called dirty war from1976 to 1983, when nearly 30,000 individuals were disappeared, tortured, and killed by Argentina’s military dictatorship. So called death flights, ‘vuelos de la muerte’ dropped victims to their deaths from airplanes or helicopters over the ocean after they’d been drugged with Pentathol. The mothers and grandmothers of the disappeared gathered each week in the Plaza de Mayo to demand answers about the fate of their loved ones. Mostly, they were greeted with silence.

Argentina was the first, but not the last. Shortly after Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende (and had him assassinated) reports of missing loved ones became increasingly common. Many left leaning students and activists were forcibly disappeared by the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA). In the end, over 250,000 people were arrested. Estimates place the number of tortured individuals at around 40,000; and as many as 3,200 were killed or disappeared. Pinochet used the National Stadium as a detention center, where his military rounded up those who he believed were opposed to his rule. The stadium was made famous in the Hollywood movie about the desaparecidos, ‘Missing’, starring Jack Lemon and Sissy Spacek. 

Among the many examples of those killed in the National Stadium include Victor Jara - a prominent Chilean Folk singer, University professor, and left-wing activist who vocally supported the Allende government. Jara, like thousands of other Chilean civilians, was tortured and murdered for his communist ideology. The Pinochet regime also advertised their efforts, dumping bodies in open areas in an attempt to terrorize and further suppress any dissent among the public. The fly swarmed corpses served as warning signs along the road to those who wouldn’t comply.

In the early 80s, El Salvador was next. During their civil war, the entire country became a killing ground. Joan Didion famously noted in her book ‘Salvador,’ that “the dead and pieces of the dead turn up in El Salvador everywhere, every day, as taken for granted as in a nightmare, or a horror movie. Vultures of course suggest the presence of a body. A knot of children on the street suggests the presence of a body. Bodies turn up in vacant lots, in the garbage thrown down ravines in the richest districts, in public restrooms, in bus stations. Some are dropped in Lake Ilopango, a few miles east of the city, and wash up near the lakeside cottages and clubs frequented by what remains in San Salvador of the sporting bourgeoisie.” 

If people in the U.S. think about El Salvador today, they are most likely to recall that it was one of the countries Donald Trump described as a “shithole” in 2018. El Salvador’s tragic civil war and the horror of their disappeared publically dumped along their streets are largely the reason. Our intel folks knew about this anti-leftist crusade across Latin America and the Southern cone and if they didn't help directly, they certainly cheered it on, through clandestine money and weapons, through propaganda efforts, through utter silence about their activities. 

In Iraq, after the U.S. invasion, it was called the 'Salvador option’ when Colonel James Steele started using the Wolf Brigade and other Shi'ite paramilitaries death squads in an attempt to quell a Sunni insurgency. All approved by Donald Rumsfeld.   

In fact, Rumsfeld recruited Steele precisely because Steele operated as a counterinsurgency specialist and was a U.S. special forces advisers to frontline battalions of the Salvadorean military from 1984 to 1986. Not surprisingly, both El Salvador and Iraq, under Steele’s leadership, developed a reputation for death squad activities. In Iraq, these paramilitaries, like the Wolf Brigade, would often conceal their faces during raids, wearing death skull masks. 

Yet, the truth is, the notion of ‘disappearing’ someone goes even further back. Decades ago, to the so-called German ‘Nacht und Nebel’ meaning Night and Fog. This was a directive, much like a Presidential executive order, issued by Adolf Hitler on December 7th, 1941 targeting political activists and resistance "helpers" in the territories occupied by Nazi Germany. The Night and Fog decree ordered that resisters were to be “imprisoned, executed, or made to disappear,” The family and the population would remain perpetually uncertain as to the fate of their cousin, their employee, their lover. Usually, those disappeared were never heard from again.

The Germans didn’t have the expression ‘desparecidos’ back then, just those ‘lost’ to the night and fog. Although they didn’t know the term, they certainly knew the meaning.

Today, the fact that ICE agents are plucking people off U.S. streets, wearing masks, and refusing to identify themselves is an eerie echo of the history of that word. 

It should frighten every living American.